Text Size

-

+

reset

Roberts also did something that outraged advocates of tighter campaign finance regulation: He used the ubiquity of super PACs to justify looser rules on political contributions. Roberts spearheaded a 5-4 high court ruling that said caps on the total amount of money an individual can give to political campaigns, PACs and parties are unconstitutional.

“It strikes us as far more likely that [the donor] will want to see his full $500,000 spent on behalf of his favored candidate — even if it must be spent independently — rather than see it diluted to a small fraction so that it can be contributed directly by someone else,” Roberts wrote.

The opinion was classic Roberts: professing to make a minor adjustment to the status quo, but carrying the seeds of potential destruction for core legal principles settled for decades. To some, it evoked his decision last year overturning the core of the Voting Rights Act — a ruling that also claimed to toss back to Congress an issue lawmakers have little desire to revisit.

Critics saw the chief justice’s arguments about the leaky nature of current campaign finance rules as cynical and disingenuous, effectively punching yet another gaping hole in the law by citing loopholes his court helped to create or enlarge.

“It’s like the definition of chutzpah: the guy who kills his parents and asks for mercy from the court because he’s an orphan,” said Larry Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice, which favors tighter campaign finance regulation. “Look at what the court has done since 2007 after Roberts came on board, one case after another gradually striking down the laws that are in place and then claiming that, therefore, more has to be done. It’s nonsensical.”

“Of course, this was the majority’s own creation,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert and University of California-Irvine law dean. Hasen said Roberts’s opinion fits a pattern in which he insists the court is only changing campaign finance law at the margins, when the ultimate impact is likely to be much more dramatic.

“The opinion we saw today is vintage Roberts in trying to downplay the seriousness with which he’s changing the law. It’s like: ‘There’s nothing to see here, folks,” the said. “It’s another way he paints himself as an incrementalist when in fact it’s quite serious.”

Advocates of stricter campaign finance laws said Roberts’s opinion would lead to a new flood of money from the rich into party committees and campaigns. However, those who favor loosening campaign finance restrictions said the court’s ruling wouldn’t have such a sweeping impact.

“I don’t think there will be this armageddon scenario…. I’m disappointed the effect would not be more dramatic, ” said Republican campaign lawyer Jan Baran of Wiley Rein. He also disputed that Roberts was cynically trying to use existing loopholes in order to create larger ones.

Roberts framed his opinion as filled with detached opinions about what “a rational actor” is likely to do, rather than as an instruction about what wealthy donors should do, Baran said.

“I think it’s just an observation that is caused as much by the type of laws that we have as by First Amendment decisions by the court,” Baran said. He observed that it was nearly four decades ago, long before Roberts arrived on the court, that the justices struck down expenditure limits as an impermissible intrusion on First Amendment rights.

In fact, the high court reached that decision in the very Buckley v. Valeo decision that supporters of campaign finance restrictions are now struggling to keep in place since it blesses limits on donations to individual campaigns.